CARMEL, Ind. — A Carmel Clay school bus struck and killed a 15-year-old freshman in January, police said today.

Carmel High School student Ziang Ke was running to catch the bus after a light morning snow on Jan. 7, according to what one high school student on the bus told police. Neither the students on the bus nor the driver said they saw Ke fall.

The students and the bus driver then felt a bump about 6:45 a.m. at Teague Place and Salamone Way, before the sunrise. The driver, Tony Fiore, stopped the bus and he and the high school students looked out the windows but did not see anything, so the driver continued on the route.

After 7 a.m., middle school students who were going to their separate bus stop in the southwest Carmel neighborhood heard someone calling for help, moaning and groaning, police said. That’s when one of the middle school students told his father about the noises, and the student’s father found Ke conscious and alert on the sidewalk.

Carmel’s 911 center received a call at 7:11 a.m. The caller indicated Ke was conscious and breathing. A Carmel police officer arrived about six minutes later and began heart-lung resuscitation on Ke.

Ke was taken to Clarian North Hospital, where he arrived about 7:40 a.m. His heart had stopped.

Certified forensic pathologist Dr. Jolene Clouse that afternoon conducted a preliminary autopsy and found Ke died from a cut liver and a compressed spine and rib cage, likely the result of a fall.

A few days later, Hamilton County Coroner Thurl Cecil said he thought the injuries were more consistent with being run over by a vehicle, possibly a school bus.

Police said no criminal charges will be filed against the driver because it was an accident. The driver took a leave of absence Wednesday, when investigators told him of their findings, to deal with emotional stress from the incident, school officials said.

The driver was not given a drug or alcohol test following the crash, because police had initially thought Ke fell on the ice and did not discover until later from interviews with students and the bus driver that a vehicle may have hit Ke.

A Carmel police spokesman said the case took months to resolve because of the initial belief that the boy had died from the fall and the difficulty in interviewing children and their parents.

Indiana State Police checked the bus for evidence after the crash, but found nothing to link to Ke’s death. Police could not immediately say how many days after the crash the search for evidence from the bus began.